The President of the Czech Republic has urged Europe to reject illegal economic migrants, warning that mass migration to the West will only drain their homelands of talent and consign them to “permanent backwardness”.

President Miloš Zeman, an elder statesman who opposed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia which crushed the Prague Spring uprising against the old Communist regime in 1968 and participated in the Velvet Revolution which finally brought it down in 1989, said there was “a dividing line between the Visegrád Group and the rest of the European Union”, with the former firmly opposed to mass immigration and the EU’s policy of the forcibly redistributing migrants throughout its territory.

Comments - Speech - Parliamentary - Assembly - Council

He made the comments in a speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe — and intergovernmental forum which predates the better known European Union, and includes many countries outside that bloc’s quasi-federal jurisdiction.

“The Visegrád Group is strictly against illegal economic migration, for many reasons,” he told the assembly.

Solution - Migrants - Countries - Budgets - Countries

“As a reasonable solution, we must help migrants in their domestic countries. That means that from the national budgets of European countries it is necessary to finance, for instance, electricity, schools, hospitals, water resources and so on – but, I repeat, in domestic countries of those migrants, not in European countries.”

President Zeman added that it was not only for Europe’s sake that he opposed illegal immigration, explaining that mass migration to the West harmed migrant countries as much as the receiving countries.

Brain - Drain - Men - Homeland - Economy

“There is a brain drain. If young, healthy men leave their homeland, they weaken its economy. The brain drain, which is sometimes a muscle drain, may condemn such...